Ok some people are mixing up between the proc of the blessing and the bubble-proc. They work in 2 different ways, so we need to look at them differently. I've read the blueposts over and over again, but I'm not 100% sure if I am right, so you might correct me if I'm wrong.

1) Proc of "Blessing of Kings":

This seems to be clear. If one of your spells actually HEAL, you got a 10% chance to proc the blessing. No matter what spell you use, no matter for how much you heal, it just needs to be a heal (say 1 hp or more). 2 Examples:

-A Paladin casts 5x Holy Light in 15 seconds. With his beacon up, he got 10 heals in sum. However, 4 of them hit the target at full health. So at the end, he did 6 actual heals, means 6 chances at 10% to proc to blessing.

So if there's raiddamage, Holy Priests (or druids) can pop up the blessing pretty fast compared to Paladins or Shamans, which should be somewhere in between. If there's no raiddamage, a Priest can spam CoH and whatnot, he won't be able proc the blessing.

2) Proc of the "bubble":

Once you got the "blessing of kings" on you, every cast places a bubble on the target(s) you are going to heal. The amount the bubble can absorb is 15% of the total heal done to the target no matter of overheal. A 20k Holy Light will pop up a bubble with 3k, no matter if you actually did 100% overheal or a 20k heal. Or Prayer of Healing healing 3x 4k and 2x 6k. So 3 targets receive a bubble worth 600 hp, and 2x 900, in sum 3600 hp but split up on different targets.
Every tick of a HoT will add to the bubble as well, however you need to remember, that this will just happen as long as the blessing is active. If you cast renew 2 seconds before the blessing ends, you won't see a bubble on the target as the first tick occures after 3 seconds (if you didn't skill empowered renew tho *g* ).

I think this Mace is pretty usefull for any healing class away from Disciplin Priests (sadly, can't understand why Blizzard didn't add Shields to the proc). People may discuss if it's better for MT heal oder raidheal, but as it is a Proc with an internal CD, that's no matter in my oppinion. You cannot be sure to have it in the right moment, so it makes things smoother, but if you can't win a fight without the mace, you won't win with it.

People may discuss if it's better for MT heal oder raidheal, but as it is a Proc with an internal CD, that's no matter in my oppinion. You cannot be sure to have it in the right moment, so it makes things smoother, but if you can't win a fight without the mace, you won't win with it.

I'm probably completely wrong here but surely; as the stats on it arn't absolutely godly you could switch it in to get the proc at a critical point and switch out to another weapon while it's on the ICD? You may not be able to do this multiple times in a fight if it somehow locks out the ICD on weapon switch but I'm not aware of anything like that being in the game I immagine melee have more experience with this kinda thing.

Would that be at all viable? When raid damage starts getting high hit your macroed mace switch. Granted it won't be perfect timing but it's still generally going to be better than having it proc at a time when it will be useless.

It's probably a futile exercise in micromanagement. The proc rate is only 10% so getting the damn thing procced "in advance" of the impending disaster is going to be exceptionally problematic. Just take the free bubbles when they occur and hope that they aren't totally wasted. This proc won't change healing setup or healer gameplay one little bit.

You're also losing GCD's everytime you swap the weapon in/out and chances are on any fight where healing is tight enough for controlling the proc to matter enough to make it worth considering you'll be losing more then you gain.

A better implementation would be an on use "grants the caster the buff to give shields" 1 minute cooldown 15second duration. Allows you to save it for any predictable burst, and removes a good bit of randomness that can be annoying.

Paladins do 23 heals every 3 seconds (12 from 2xHL+Glyph, 2x from Beacon, 9 ticks from Judgement of Light). [Looked at some random Saph kills on WWS and JoL seemed to average 2-4 ticks/second in 25 mans]

Holy paladins are the worst choice to be judging light, however. A retribution paladin has a far superior JoL due to the scaling. Under normal raid conditions, your holy won't be doing any healing with JoL.

ttyl I think you got several things wrong there (even tho I'm not sure myself of everthing *g*)

1st off, I'm very unsure about glyphs. This is a huge issue, since there are many glyphs popping up heals (PW:S, 1 more target for CoH, PoH, HL, etc). Would be nice to see blue statement upon that, so if someone could ask GC or so would be pretty nice.

Anyway, your numbers are pretty wired. CoH hits 5 targets by default, 6 with glyph. PoM may use up all 5 (6 with setbonus) bounces during 6 seconds, tho it's not comon. Renew may tick 2 times. Penance hits 3 times, PW:S shouldn't proc it at all (or is there a new bluepost where this was edited?), Glyph as mentioned might not work as well. And do Paladins really get enough haste to reduce their casttime by 1 second? Not to mention that these numbers are very situational since HL-glyph only got 8 yards range and several bosses wouldn't allow any player away from the tank to come that close, same for the AoE-spells of priests and druids or even shamans' CH.

If you really want true numbers, you need to check out several, different bossfights over the full duration and a clarification if the blessing might be procced by glyphs.

Total uptime of the buff is going to be very similar for all classes, it's not really a factor. I'm a bit disappointed that the shields only lasts 8 seconds, that alone means that it's going to be quite worthless for raid healing for many encounters. Would be much more attractive if it was 20-30 seconds, right now I feel a bit bad to be collecting the shards instead of a paladin who'd benefit a whole lot more from it.

Hm, if I understand this correct, glyph-heals will proc while PW:S itself won't. So a 6k PW:S is worth 1200 (20% heal from the glyph) and if the bessing procs, you gain a bubble, which absorbs 15% of that 1200 -> 180? That's still a bad news for disc-priests, while paladins will gain a huge buff regarding the proc chance.

I'm a bit disappointed that the shields only lasts 8 seconds, that alone means that it's going to be quite worthless for raid healing for many encounters.

Well the duration of the shield is refreshed every time a heal from the mace user is applied, meaning hots will actually provide a shield for a lot more than 8 seconds. Proc may be quite insane in the hands of a 4T8 druid using rejuv / WG for raid healing.

Regarding hots, I have 2 related questions :

Do the hots coming from heals casted before the blessing is applied create shields ?

Do the hots casted while the blessing is up create shields even after the blessing has vanished ?

I would say yes and no, or no and yes, depending on how the blessing works, I for sure hope it's not no and no

It includes healing done by subsequent ticks of existing hots on the target.

That makes the mace quite powerful regarding tank healing if all hots are up, but reduces the maximal duration of a shield (15 + 8 = 23 seconds, vs almost 45s if a talented regrowth is used under blessing)

I think some folks are missing the point on the napkin math. Yes you may lose some shield with raid healing. And yes some spells (CoH and CH) may not be as good at keeping the shield up beyond the initial 8 seocnds.

But in reality in a raid dmg fight 8 seconds is a LONG time to go without damage. At leats in Ulduar. Igniss is obviously periodic, and Kolo is more than 8 seconds but from then on pretty much every fight that has raid dmg will eat the shields (your talking 100-1000 for most AOE heal spells).

And that doesnt include the ability to use overheal to max shields during a proc if you know damage is incoming. That will kill your HPM but if it gives you abuffer its worth it in many situations.

I agree that this in the hands of a good pally is an amazing Tank healing tool. But dont discount what a Druid, Holy Priest or Shammie could get out of this.

I really believe that one of these in the hands of a good player will allow you to lower the healing requirements of most fights by at LEAST 1/2 a healer and probably a full healer slot. (Whether I think this is a good thing is a seperate issue). For hard modes like Yogg-0 and Alg this may make the difference between never getting a kill and getting one.

1) It'll be a while before a guild gets one of these, let alone two. Are they giving the first one to a raid healer or a tank healer? Pretty likely the latter. If you are waiting on your second hammer for your raid healer to "save half a healer" to get Algalon or Yogg, hard mode, well, you're doing something else wrong.

2) A lot of tiny shields on the raid sounds like it saves healing, but it really doesn't. Anytime you raid heal, there is inherent overheal. Your CoH hits 5 people for 3200 each, e.g., some of them need 2200 healing, some need 3000, whatever. If those tiny shields on your raid came while a damage aura was pulsing, they might mitigate the need for the "nth heal" and be saving the raid healers. But typically, it does't work that way. Instead, someone is CoHing, CHing, PoHing, WGing, whatever and topping people off. Unless the damage is still occurring during that and completely obviates the "nth heal" the proc is well nigh useless in this context.

I'm not saying you don't want the proc; I'm saying you are going to get very much from the proc: You are unlikely to save anyone in imminent danger of death and you are unlikely to actually be able to avoid casting a heal because the shield did your job. It'd have to absorb so much more damage than it does to actually obviate a heal and it'd have to be cast "earlier" -- which of course is impossible until wielding the weapon has a proc that ranodmly shields targets in your raid -- to do that.

We are talking about a shield that will absorb 400-800 damage in most cases in a raid context. And it can only grow if you yourself heals those targets again. If people are still not topped off, however, you will cast another heal to do that, mostly overhealing but necessary. The shielded people will be unlikely to benefit from the shield over the subsequent seconds because the big burst of raid damage is over, etc. And, again, if there's an aura, this is moderately interesting, but things like JoL, iLotP, etc. make it less exciting to absorb say 600 damage when other healing might've covered that anyway.

As a holy priest, my glyphed CoHs are roughly 21-23k total heals raid buffed, IIRC, but rarely heal over 10k total except on high aoe damage like mimi p2 because of range restrictions and 2-3 resto druids spamming WG at all times. For being such a mana efficient heal, the high overhealing is a real drag and a blessing would be fantastic for making use of the huge heals for a single gcd. And even on things like mimi p2 where it's 0 overhealing because of high raid damage and close radius, obviously being able to put shields on would mitigate tons of damage, and if I've noticed anything from my guild's exploits in Ulduar (still haven't downed Yoggy due to attendance problems) it's raid damage that causes wipes, not tanks dying.

I'd honestly pass it to a resto shaman above all else though.

EDIT:

2) A lot of tiny shields on the raid sounds like it saves healing, but it really doesn't. Anytime you raid heal, there is inherent overheal. Your CoH hits 5 people for 3200 each, e.g., some of them need 2200 healing, some need 3000, whatever. If those tiny shields on your raid came while a damage aura was pulsing, they might mitigate the need for the "nth heal" and be saving the raid healers. But typically, it does't work that way. Instead, someone is CoHing, CHing, PoHing, WGing, whatever and topping people off. Unless the damage is still occurring during that and completely obviates the "nth heal" the proc is well nigh useless in this context.

Targets taking less damage means targets needing less healing which saves your healers mana or means that your smart heals will hit higher priority targets. If people are getting topped off easily through heavy raid damage (think tantrums pre-nerf), then it's a moot point who gets it because you're running too healer-heavy anyway. It saves mana by reducing the need for extra heals, plain and simple, and beyond that it's raid BURST that wipes raids more than sustained raid damage... shields help with burst more than direct heals because you're GCD strained; it's the same philosophy as stacking stam in PvP so you can survive through periods of burst and then top yourself off.

What we are saying is that the shields that you would get on raid healing are way to small to be noticeable. A disc priest raid healing with PoH can already generate bubbles that are bigger than this mace and which last longer and no-one thinks "wow that's awesome, we must have these microbubbles on the raid to save 1/3 of a cast maybe by some random raid healer" which is what the argument boils down to. PWS is a totally different kettle of fish though. There is real value in spamming this across the raid in high damage situations because it will absorb an order of magnitude more damage, 6-7k vs 600-700.

This is such a small amount of shielding at about 5% of the squishiest raid members life. What kills people in high raid damage situations isn't the fact that they needed another few hundred points in heals, what kills them is that the healers can't output healing to enough targets simultaneously to keep everyone alive. The deaths are normally major overkill in the 3-5k range that require serious healing that the overwhelmed healers couldn't provide either through overload or bad coordination. Think Malygos vortex healing. You got any sort of healing on the target and they would live with 1-2k life. no heals and they probably died.

Finally the low uptime means that you have to assign healing resources so that the worst case scenario is coverable by the healing resources sans proc for those times when the RNG does not favour you.

ATargets taking less damage means targets needing less healing which saves your healers mana or means that your smart heals will hit higher priority targets.... It saves mana by reducing the need for extra heals, plain and simple, and beyond that it's raid BURST that wipes raids more than sustained raid damage... shields help with burst more than direct heals because you're GCD strained; it's the same philosophy as stacking stam in PvP so you can survive through periods of burst and then top yourself off.

In theory, these mana savings occur. In reality, I don't think these "extra heals" are being obviated by these tiny shields. We are not talking PW:S size absorbs here. We are talking small bits of absorb. Unless they knock out the need for an entire heal -- like the 3rd or 4th bounch of Chain -- then they aren't saving a heal. Saving 1/3 of a CoH that's being cast anyway? Not that exciting. And therein lies the problem.

And, yes. I get that it could change who is targeted by smart heals. But the presence of the shield won't stop said heals from hitting the lowest people. And the absorb of said shield appears to low to make those people not need any heal.

EDIT: Elly covered most of this; sorry for a bit of redundancy to make the point.